The Sims 4 Strives to be a Leaner Experience

If you’ve ever wanted to swim with toddlers, The Sims 4 won’t be your top game of the year.  

As fans have been outraged at recent omissions from the Sims franchise, Maxis has started to respond to some of the uproar: Rachel Franklin goes on to say in a recent “The Sims 4” blog post,

“So the bottom line is that when we sat down and looked at everything we wanted to do for this game, all the new tech we wanted to build into it, the fact was that there would be trade-offs, and these would disappoint some of our fans.” Maxis has had to make cuts to their development process according to Franklin, but these are supposedly for the greater good of The Sims franchise. 

It’s not only the lack of toddlers and pools that have avid Sims players aggravated, the new Create A Style system from the Sims 3 won’t be making a comeback either, leaving “Simmers” to speculate what will be left for add-on packs down the road. At the end of a Sims day, the changes are said to have been made for stability and increased levels of realism within the Sims themselves.

“So, rather than include toddlers, we chose to go deeper on the features that make Sims come alive: meaningful and often amusing emotions; more believable motion and interactions; more tools in Create A Sim, and more realistic (and sometimes weird!) Sim behavior.” 

Maxis seems to be doubling down on the new interactions that your Sims will have with the world around them. By taking away some “milestone” features, “The Sims 4” strives for gameplay that feels natural with an improved UI and animations to streamline the gameplay.

“In The Sims 4, there are seven unique walk styles that you can choose from to help your Sims express themselves. To make those walk styles come to life, we had to create around 75 distinct animations. And it doesn’t stop there.

Every emotion in The Sims 4 comes with a visible reaction or even another special walk style. No more looking at the UI to figure out how your Sims are feeling – just look at their faces, posture, movements. That’s where you’ll see about 320 new emotion-based animations, as well as over 600 reactions to objects.”

The Sims 4 is set for release on September 2nd in North America — frequent Sims players will be eager to glean any more information about future changes to the beloved Sims franchise as the release date nears.